HOW TO INVENT A NEW COLOUR

The screen you’re reading this on can’t show every colour your eyes can see. And even the best screens still have their limits.

That’s because RGB displays make colours from three lights – red, green and blue. To plot what it can show you, just draw a triangle. Inside that triangle sits its total gamut of colour. The limits of its possibilities.

Mix the R, the G, and the B any way you like to find endless new shades. But you’ll never invent a new colour, one that sits outside them. You can’t blend your way past the corners.

To invent a new colour, you need to expand the triangle’s corners. Or find a new corner entirely.

So what’s the point we’re making? Well, any form of intelligence has a gamut. A total landscape of possibilities that lie inside it. And, for a language model, its corners are set by the words it was trained on.

It will, therefore, be able to reach all points within it. And some of them will be ones that no human has visited before. Perhaps a proof no mathematician has written. Candidate molecules no chemist synthesised.

But if so, all of these things will have been inside the edges of the space that were defined by its training.

So how can we give machines new colours?

Making the model larger can take it further inside the triangle – further in, not out. And a model learning from its own output is still a painter locked in a room. With busier canvases but no new paint.

New senses, by contrast, can add new actual dimensions.

Sound is no blend of colour; touch is no blend of sound.

And the world can also answer back – the failed experiment, the person saying ‘wrong’, the robot arm meeting the wall it didn’t predict.

These lie outside the model. And they can bring new possibilities to it.

In-the-end-at-the-end? Every mind’s gamut, silicon or otherwise, is shaped by what it has touched. And the world itself keeps the supply of corners.

So if you’re looking to expand your gamut further, you can read the full essay - ‘How to Invent a New Colour’ - on our Substack.

Invent away now.